How To Put a Product Nobody Has Heard of in Front of a Cold Audience, With Limited Runway

Going to Market From a Standing Start

Nobody is waiting for your product.

That is the honest starting position, and most go-to-market advice quietly assumes otherwise. It assumes an audience that already knows the category, a buyer already searching for a fix, and enough runway to find out slowly. Early-stage founders have none of those things. They have a product, a small amount of cash, a shrinking number of months, and a market that has never heard their name.

Three ideas do most of the work from there.

1. Get the demand foundation right
2. Chase the strongest commitment you can get
3. Understand that there are only four ways into a cold audience, and pick one deliberately

The last section (Part 4) of this article maps all of it onto twelve go-to-market archetypes, because the right move genuinely differs depending on what kind of business you are running.

A note on how to use this: The twelve archetypes are a lens, not set in stone. They are not a tidy taxonomy; they overlap, and plenty of businesses sit across two. That is fine. The point is not to classify yourself correctly. It is to work out which constraint is actually standing between you and a paying customer, and to stop burning cash and months on the eleven problems that are not yours.

One assumption before you start: This piece assumes you have already done the demand-side work: named your first buyer, interviewed them about their behaviour, and understood the job they are hiring you for and the habit you are really competing with. If you have not, start there, because an archetype tells you which game you are playing, not who your customer is or what to say to them. The method for that groundwork is a companion piece, Go-to-Market for Early-Stage Startup Founders. This one picks up where that leaves off.

Why I wrote this thought leadership blog post: Most of what follows was earned. I’ve spent the last few years in the go-to-market space, mentoring and coaching founders across industries and business types. Sitting that close to so many different businesses at once, you start to see the pattern: the right first move for a marketplace is the wrong one for a spinout, and the founder who is quietly failing is usually running a motion built for a business they aren’t. These twelve archetypes are that pattern, written down, so you can find yours faster than I did.

Part 1: The Demand Foundation

The single most important thing is not a channel or a tactic. It is demand-side clarity: a precisely named first buyer, the job they are hiring you for, the competing alternative they would otherwise use (including doing nothing), and the trigger, the Locksmith Moment, that flips them from passive to actively looking.

Get this right, and your tactics become obvious and, more importantly, testable. Get it wrong, and every channel looks broken, because you can never tell whether the tactic failed or the targeting did. That is the real cost of skipping this step. It is not that you make bad decisions. It is that you cannot learn from any of them.

A tactic without a strategy is expensive experimentation with no feedback loop.

Three things fall straight out of the foundation, and one cautionary tale:

Are you harvesting demand or creating it?

Your named competitive alternative tells you which. The two require completely different go-to-market approaches.

If the alternative is a known category, your buyer is already searching for a fix. You intercept that intent. This is the cheapest, highest-converting cold reach available to anyone, and if it is open to you, take it.

If the alternative is a spreadsheet, a workaround, or doing nothing at all, then nobody is searching, because they do not know a solution exists. You cannot harvest demand that is not being expressed. You have to borrow audiences, arrive at the trigger moment, and educate. Most genuinely new products sit in this second camp, which is precisely why founders with novel products buy search ads and then wonder where the volume went. There was never any volume to buy.

Your economics constrain your motion

Average contract value and purchase frequency largely determine how you can sell. Low value cannot carry a salesperson, so it forces self-serve or consumer economics. High value both affords and demands human selling.

Getting this fit wrong is a common early death: a self-serve product jammed into an enterprise sale, or an enterprise-complexity product priced with no room for anyone to sell it.

This is a constraint rather than a rule, and it has a clear exception. Some businesses are defined by a structural feature that sets the motion regardless of price: e.g., liquidity in a marketplace, inventory in hardware, regulation in a procurement sale, scientific risk in deep tech. If one of those describes you, the structure picks your motion, and the price follows, not the other way round.

Go narrow and exclude some

Exclusion is the strategy. If your positioning does not confidently exclude someone, it is not sharp enough to attract anyone. On a short runway, this is not a branding preference. It is the only way to make a signal legible: go narrow enough that when something works, you know why.

What this looks like when it goes wrong

The pattern repeats so often it is almost a genre.

Let’s say, a founder arrives with what they are certain is a channel problem. They have built something good. They are selling software into schools. Teachers love it, and say so, warmly and often. The founder has run outbound, taken dozens of enthusiastic calls, and closed almost nothing. They want to know which channel to try next, or whether the price is wrong.

The channel is not the problem. Neither is the price.

Ask who the buyer is, and the answer comes back: “schools.” That is not a buyer. Push harder, and it emerges that the person who loves the product is a classroom teacher or a head of year. The person who can actually spend money is a business manager or, in some cases, the local authority. Nobody had ever separated the two, because the enthusiastic calls felt like progress.

Now the rest unravels quickly. The job the teacher is hiring the product for is, “make my Tuesday less exhausting.” The job the budget holder is hiring it for is, “evidence we are meeting our statutory duty without adding admin.” Those are different products, and only one of them has money behind it. And the competing alternative is not a rival startup at all. It is the platform the school already pays for, has already been approved to use, and has already trained everyone on.

Then the real diagnosis lands. The founder believed they were a mid-market B2B software business, so they ran a mid-market motion: outbound, demos, follow-ups, chase. They were never that. They were a regulated, procurement-gated business, and had been from the first line of code. A champion who loves you still cannot buy you if you are not approved for purchase.

What changes after that is not a better email. It is a different game entirely: working out which platforms the schools are already approved to buy through, and integrating with one rather than trying to displace it. Same product. Same founder. Same runway. A completely different motion, because the buyer, the job, and the alternative finally had names.

Not one part of that diagnosis required a new tactic. It required someone to stop and ask who actually signs the deal.

Part 2: The Commitment Ladder

With limited runway, you are not buying growth. You are buying evidence, and the fastest honest answer to whether the demand is real.

So chase the least fakeable signal you can get per pound and per week spent.

The principle underneath the ladder is simple: a signal is worth what it cost the person to give it. Not what it cost you to obtain, and not how good it made you feel. What it cost them.

Ranked by cost to the giver, weakest to strongest:

1. Reversible interest: A waitlist signup, a free trial, a warm nod in a meeting, “this looks great.” It costs the buyer nothing, so it proves nothing. This is the rung most founders mistake for traction.
2. Costly effort: A deep integration, real production usage, a repeated transaction, a cohort that tolerates your clumsy manual onboarding and comes back anyway. They are spending something scarce: time, political capital, engineering hours.
3. Money committed: A deposit, a paid pilot, a signed letter of intent with a named budget behind it. They have put something at risk.
4. Money paid: Cash, for the thing, at a price. The least fakeable signal there is.

Two cautions, because the ladder is a heuristic and not a rule. Magnitude matters as much as type: a £5 impulse purchase is money paid, and a £50,000 letter of intent is only money committed, but the second is by far the stronger evidence. And the source matters: money from someone who is not your buyer, such as a grant body or a competition prize, is not demand evidence at all, however welcome the cash. Read every signal by what it cost the person who gave it, and by whether that person is the one you eventually need to sell to.

How high up that ladder you can climb, and how fast, is mostly a question of trust.

Where trust is the barrier, and where it is not

Trust is built by delivering, over time. You do not have time.

That is the whole problem. A new company has no track record to point at, and building one takes longer than your runway allows. So where trust is the binding constraint, you borrow it rather than build it.

That applies in Enterprise, Mid-Market, Fintech and Infrastructure, Hardware, Regulated, High-Ticket, and Deep Tech, as well as to the stranger-to-stranger trust inside a Marketplace. In all of them, you lean on institutions that already hold credibility: partnerships, accelerators, advisors, certifications, university and lab affiliations, marquee design partners. The halo effect is doing the work. A buyer’s defences drop for a source they already trust in a way they never will for you directly.

In Mass Consumer, Prosumer, and Self-Serve, trust is not the barrier, because the cost of trying you is low. Reviews, ratings and privacy still matter, but institutional credibility is not your lever, and borrowed credibility can spike acquisition without saving you. Here you do the opposite: minimise the trust ask. Free trials, freemium, a working sandbox, concierge onboarding. Let belief come from experience rather than assertion.

Productised services are the one archetype that starts warm. Trust is absolutely the product, but you already have some, earned from prior delivery. The job is to make it visible.

Part 3: The Cold-Reach Playbook

Reaching an audience that has never heard of you is a trust problem before it is a messaging problem. A stranger will not grant attention to an unknown product on the strength of your words alone, however good the words are.

Your best early customers do not arrive cold. They arrive pre-warmed by something or someone that vouched for you.

That leaves four ways in.

• Borrowed trust: Someone the buyer already trusts vouches for you or channels their audience to you: partners, communities, marketplaces and app stores, creators, referrals, institutional halo.
• Existing intent: They are already looking, so you intercept: search, marketplaces, review and comparison sites, “alternatives to X”.
• Product loops: The product distributes itself through invites, collaboration, or output that gets shared.
• Founder-led direct: One-to-one outreach, made warm wherever possible. The only reliable route for high-value deals when no audience exists yet.

Paid advertising is not a fifth route. It is an amplifier of the other four, which is exactly why it behaves so unpredictably for early companies. Paid works when it intercepts intent, or when it carries borrowed trust in the form of a creator, a proof point, a recognisable customer. It works badly as pure cold broadcast at strangers who have no reason to care, which is where most early ad budgets quietly go to die. Money buys you reach. It does not buy you a reason to be listened to.

Which leads to the uncomfortable case. If you have none of the four, your first job is not marketing. It is manufacturing one of them. Get into the accelerator. Land the advisor. Sign the design partner whose logo you can use. Build the loop into the product. There is no fifth option, and no budget substitutes for one.

What this means for the channels founders reach for first

Untargeted cold outreach, untargeted paid, and general-purpose social broadcasting all carry no trust signal, which is exactly why they underperform for unknown companies. A cold email makes you an unverified stranger asking for time. The identical message routed through a partner, advisor, or peer the buyer trusts does not.

Which raises the obvious objection: founder-led direct outreach is one of the four routes, so how can cold outreach both work and not work? The difference is not the channel. It is what you bring to it. Outreach that names a specific trigger the buyer is living through right now and offers real insight rather than a demo request earns attention on relevance alone. Outreach sent in volume, to a list, in hope, earns nothing. The first is the hardest and most valuable work available to a founder. The second is a numbers game, and you do not have the numbers to win.

This is also not a claim that broadcasting never works. Content, SEO, and audience-building do work, and they compound beautifully. The problem is the clock. They compound over a period you cannot currently fund, and they produce muddy signal in the early months when you most need clean answers. So they are a poor starting strategy on a short runway, not a bad idea in general. Start them early if you like, but do not stake the runway on them.

The channels that carry a trust signal are the ones that pay early: referral, institutional partnerships, community contribution that others cite, and, increasingly, visibility in the AI answers your buyers are now consulting alongside search.

One or many is decided by your economics

A cold audience “of one” means named accounts, founder-led, and warm intros deliberately manufactured. That is the only thing that works when the deal is large, and no audience exists yet.

A cold audience “of many” means you cannot afford one-to-one, so you need aggregation: a platform that already holds the audience, a product loop, a creator, or paid. Which of those you get depends on what you can afford per customer, which takes you straight back to your price.

Part 4: The Twelve Archetypes

The right move genuinely differs by what kind of business you are. Below, each archetype gets what it is, the strongest commitment to chase, the primary way to reach a cold audience, and the trap most likely to burn the runway.

Find yourself in the table. Two things to keep in mind while you do. Structure beats price: if you are a marketplace, hardware, regulated, or deep-tech business, that fact overrides your price point in deciding your motion. And if you straddle two, read both, then let your single biggest gate lead, meaning the one thing actually standing between you and a paying customer.

1. B2C Mass Consumer

What it is: Free or cheap products for very large audiences, where growth comes from loops and retention. Social, media, consumer tools.

Chase: A retention curve that flattens above zero, and any sign of organic multiplication inside a small cohort. Not revenue, and not paid acquisition, until retention is proven. Acquisition without retention is filling a leaky bucket faster.

Reach: The product has to distribute itself through one loop, or ride a platform that already holds the many: an app store, an algorithm, a creator. Institutional credibility is not your lever here. Delight in the first session is.

Trap: Buying installs before the loop and the retention curve exist. Consumer lifetime value is thin, so paid rarely pencils out until the bucket holds water.

2. B2C Subscription / Prosumer

What it is: Individuals paying monthly for something they build a habit around. Paid apps, creator tools, fitness and health.

Chase: The first cohort that survives the second bill. Charge early. Trial-to-paid and month-two retention are the real proof, and a large free audience you hope to convert later is not evidence of willingness to pay.

Reach: Go where the habit audience already gathers and borrow a creator’s or community’s trust, paired with intent capture (app store search, “best X app”). Show the product working rather than describing it.

Trap: Broad generic advertising instead of one specific creator or community wedge.

3. B2B Self-Serve / Product-Led-Growth (PLG)

What it is: Small businesses sign up and buy without talking to anyone. The product sells itself.

Chase: Activation and time-to-first-value: a user reaching the point of real value alone, and coming back. Early on, watch activation rate and week-four retention. Net revenue retention becomes the engine later, once your cohorts are large enough for the number to mean anything.

Do unscalable things first. Onboard your earliest users by hand, watch precisely where they stall, then engineer that friction out of the product.

Reach: Two engines. Intercept intent (problem-led content, integration directories, “alternatives to X”), and build product loops (invites, collaboration, shareable output, a real free tier). Best of all, meet users inside the workflows they already live in, through integrations, so the product earns trust before asking anyone to change behaviour.

Trap: Bolting a sales team onto a self-serve price point when the real problem is weak activation. If users are not reaching value alone, humans will not save the economics.

4. B2B Mid-Market

What it is: Deals roughly in the £10,000 to £50,000 range, needing a light sales touch on top of a product that demos itself. The bands here are a guide, not a boundary. What matters is whether the deal can carry a salesperson.

Chase: The first handful of closed, paid deals through founder-led selling, and a nameable, repeatable motion you could eventually hand to someone else. The strongest early commitment is a paid pilot with defined success criteria that converts to an annual contract. Charge for the pilot. A free pilot is a polite yes, and it drifts.

Reach: Founder-led outbound, made warm. Partner referrals, co-hosted roundtables with an organisation the buyer already trusts, and outreach that leads with a specific trigger and a real insight rather than a demo request.

Trap: Volume outbound. You convert on relevance plus a trust signal, not on send count. Name the champion and the budget holder in every deal, because they are rarely the same person.

5. B2B Enterprise

What it is: Six-figure deals with long cycles, procurement, and multiple stakeholders. Founder-led and relationship-driven.

Chase: Two or three lighthouse design partners, not a wide funnel. The real commitment is a signed agreement with a named champion and a named economic buyer, plus internal proof your champion can use to defend the decision. Here the blocker is anxiety rather than price, and your true competitor is “no decision”.

Reach: Warm intros convert at a multiple of cold, and with limited runway you have neither the volume nor the months that cold outbound demands. So prioritise the founder’s network, advisor and investor introductions, marquee logos, and the institutional halo of accelerators and partners. Show up where the buyer already is, and co-host where you can, so you borrow the venue’s credibility.

Trap: Running enterprise like lead generation. The other trap is arithmetic: enterprise cycles are long and cash-hungry, so they can quietly outlast your runway. Compress them with warm intros, and take non-dilutive commitments (paid pilots, letters of intent) where you can get them.

6. Two-Sided Marketplace

What it is: A platform matching supply and demand, where the value depends entirely on liquidity between the two sides.

Chase: Liquidity in a deliberately narrow beachhead: one city, one category. Solve the harder side first, usually the supply side. The signal is a repeated transaction, measured by match or fill rate. Gross merchandise value flatters you while hiding a broken core.

Reach: You cannot market to “the market”. Acquire the constrained side by hand, even if the founder has to be the supply at first. Once that side is dense enough, it becomes the magnet that pulls the other, and the platform manufactures the trust between strangers through vetting and guarantees.

Trap: Paying to acquire demand before there is supply to serve it. And spreading across cities or categories to escape a liquidity problem, which guarantees you never reach liquidity anywhere.

7. Transactional / Fintech / Infrastructure

What it is: API-first, usage-based products adopted by developers, where reliability and integration decide everything.

Chase: A few teams that integrate and push real production usage through you. Usage is the truth signal, and a deep integration is a genuine commitment because it is expensive to reverse. Beware the developer who explores the sandbox enthusiastically and never ships.

Reach: Developer to developer, integration-led. Win a handful of design-partner integrations, then earn reach through documentation, a quickstart that works first time, presence in the ecosystems and marketplaces developers already browse, and the communities they already inhabit. Other developers building on you is the trust signal.

Trap: Marketing to buyers instead of the developers who actually adopt. And in fintech, treating regulation as a later problem: the partner-bank and licensing route is a distribution gate in its own right, and it will eat runway if you sequence it late.

8. Hardware / Physical + Software

What it is: Physical products, often with software attached, constrained by inventory, margin, and supply chain.

Chase: Validated demand before you build inventory. Money down before production exists is the gold signal. A waitlist is weak; a deposit is strong.

Reach: This splits, and the split matters. Consumer hardware can pre-sell through a campaign that manufactures attention, trust, and commitment at once: crowdfunding is a distribution, validation, and social-proof platform in one, backed by a working prototype, creators, and press. Industrial, B2B, and medical hardware is a different sport entirely, where crowdfunding is largely irrelevant. There you pre-sell through design partners, letters of intent, pilot deployments, distributors and the trade channel, and the trade shows where your buyers already are.

In both cases, seed it with the finished-product story written as though you were not the founder, circulate it, and watch who puts money down.

Trap: Building inventory before demand is validated. Hardware punishes runway mistakes harder than any other archetype, because the mistake is physical and sitting in a warehouse.

9. Regulated / Gov / Healthcare / Defence

What it is: Selling where the purchase is gated by regulation, accreditation, and formal procurement. Govtech, digital health, medical devices, defence, anything requiring clinical evidence, a security clearance, or a place on an approved framework.

Chase: Not just a pilot, but a sanctioned one: a pilot with a named public body that sits inside a real procurement pathway, generates evidence, and produces a reference you can reuse. Getting onto a buying framework and clearing your first accreditation are commitments in their own right.

The thing to internalise is that the gate is rarely the buyer’s willingness. It is compliance, information governance, and procurement. A champion who loves you still cannot buy you if you are not approved to be bought. This is the trap the school’s founder in Part 1 was sitting inside without knowing it, and it is the most expensive misdiagnosis in this archetype because, from the outside, it looks exactly like a sales problem.

Reach: You will not cold-outreach your way in. Enter through the sanctioned front doors: innovation challenges and accelerators, framework listings, standards bodies, and warm introductions from people already trusted inside the institution. Challenge and grant programmes are the highest-leverage entry points available because they give you budget, institutional halo, and an open door at the same time.

Trap: Pilot purgatory: an enthusiastic champion and an endless, unpaid, side-door pilot that can never convert, because it never sat inside a procurement path or you were never accredited to scale it. The other killer is underestimating what compliance costs in months and cash, both of which come out of runway before any revenue arrives.

10. Services-to-Product (Productised Services)

What it is: Starting as a done-for-you service, then packaging the repeatable core into a named, fixed-scope, fixed-price offer. Often the stepping stone from bespoke work to something genuinely scalable.

Chase: Paying clients for the packaged offer rather than the bespoke version, plus repeat purchase and referral. The proof is repeatability: the same package, solving the same job, for the same kind of buyer, sold without writing a custom proposal every time. That repeatability is the evidence there is a product in here at all.

Reach: Warm first, and this is the one archetype that begins warm by default. Your own network, past clients, and referrals. Authority-building genuinely earns cold reach over time here because you are selling expertise, and trust is the product. Delivering under another firm’s banner works well too. Once the offer is properly packaged, with a clear scope and price, you finally have something concrete that paid, and content-led acquisition can actually sell. Before that, they have nothing to point at.

Trap: Never actually productising. Every engagement stays a snowflake, nothing becomes repeatable, and you have built yourself a demanding job rather than a business. The close second is packaging the wrong thing: the work you enjoy, rather than the repeatable job the market keeps hiring you for. And pricing on time rather than outcome, which caps your value and signals commodity.

11. High-Ticket Transactional

What it is: Infrequent, high-consideration, high-value consumer purchases. Homes, cars, luxury goods, high-end experiences. B2C by audience, but closer to enterprise in the intensity of a single deal.

Chase: Completed high-value sales from a source you can repeat, and the referrals and reviews they generate. Because repeat purchase is rare, reputation is the compounding asset. Qualified in-market leads that convert matter far more than cheap volume.

Reach: Intercept active intent at the consideration moment (search, category portals, comparison and review sites), then stack social proof so you win the trust contest while they are still comparing. A human closes on top of the marketing-generated lead, so this is a hybrid: consumer marketing creates the lead, relationship selling converts it.

Luxury is the exception worth naming. Its demand is aspired to rather than searched for, so it is reached through borrowed status and context (creators, editorial, scarcity, the right rooms) rather than intent capture.

Trap: Treating it like low-ticket consumer and optimising for cheap clicks, when the game is qualified intent plus trust for a considered, high-margin purchase. Leads with nobody to close them, or closers with no lead flow, are two halves of the same failure. And for luxury, chasing reach and discounting erodes the scarcity the whole proposition rests on.

12. Deep Tech / Long-R&D

What it is: Ventures where the core risk is scientific and capital-intensive, with horizons measured in years before a sellable product exists. Novel materials, therapeutics, quantum, fusion, semiconductors, advanced robotics, space. Technology risk dominates market risk.

Chase: Here you must hold two different currencies apart, because founders conflate them constantly and it is expensive.

Non-dilutive funding buys you time. Grants, prizes, and challenge awards are won on technical merit, and they extend runway and confer credibility. They are not evidence for demand. The grant body is not your customer, and no amount of grant funding proves anyone will ever buy the thing.

Offtakes and letters of intent buy you evidence. A named future customer committing to purchase if you clear a technical milestone, or putting co-development effort at stake, is the strongest market signal available before a product exists. That is the one that tells you the market is real.

Chase both. Never mistake the first for the second. Milestones are the product at this stage, and each de-risking step is what unlocks the next round.

Reach: Your early audience is not a market. It is investors, grant bodies, strategic partners, and a handful of lighthouse future customers, so reach is founder-led and ecosystem-based. Enter through the credibility ecosystem: university tech transfer, deep-tech accelerators, grant and challenge programmes, research consortia, domain conferences, and the networks of credible investors and advisors. Trust here is scientific and institutional, borrowed from a lab, an investor, a domain authority, or a peer-reviewed result.

Trap: Perfecting the science with no market pull, then surfacing years later with brilliant technology and no committed buyer. Run market de-risking in parallel with technical de-risking: line up the letters of intent, and understand your future buyer’s real job, long before you can serve it.

The other killer is asserting technical claims you cannot yet evidence. It collapses under due diligence, and in this archetype the difference between evidenced and asserted is unforgiving.

Part 5: The Through-Line

You never ever market to a cold mass. You do one of four things: borrow someone else’s trust and let it carry you to their audience, intercept people who are already looking, build a product that distributes itself, or go and talk to buyers one at a time with something worth their attention.

Six moves hold across every archetype:

1. Name the buyer, the job, the alternative, and the trigger before choosing anything else.
2. Chase the strongest commitment you can realistically get, and judge every signal by what it cost the person who gave it.
3. Borrow trust where trust is the barrier. Remove the need for it where the product can prove itself.
4. Go narrow enough that a signal is unambiguous.
5. Be present at the trigger moment rather than shouting into the void.
6. Take one of the four routes in, deliberately. Paid amplifies whichever one you pick. It does not replace them.

None of this makes the first customer easy. It makes the first customer legible, which on a short runway is worth more. When something works, you will know why. When something fails, you will know what failed. That is the difference between spending your remaining months learning and spending them guessing.

Work With Me

If you read the table and weren’t sure which archetype you are, or you’re sure, but the move you’re currently making doesn’t match it, that’s worth a conversation.

I work with early-stage founders to name the game they’re actually playing, then build the demand-side evidence that turns an archetype into a specific buyer, a specific message, and a specific next move. The founders I do my best work with have a solid product and customers, and a nagging sense they’re reaching for tactics before they’ve built the strategy underneath them.

The first step is a discovery call. Not a pitch. An honest read on which archetype you’re in, and what your next move should be.

About the Author

Sid Kathirvel is the founder of Unlock Growth, a growth marketing strategy and implementation consultancy in Edinburgh. With 25 years in the field, he was named Digital Boost Marketing Mentor of the Year 2024.

He works in two ways. As a Fractional CMO and Strategic Growth Partner, he helps owner-managed SMEs and funded startups build evidence-based go-to-market strategies. As a mentor, he coaches early-stage and scale-up founders through the accelerator and university programmes he works with, including CodeBase, Techscaler, Barclays Eagle Labs, Opportunity North East, the RBS Accelerator, TecTonic Night Summit, Glasgow Clyde College, and the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh Innovations).

His work is built on frameworks such as Jobs-to-Be-Done, the Four Forces of Progress, Locksmith Moments, Positioning, and the Messaging House.